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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

I've found the Ubuntu [Desktop] stability to be in constant decline over the time, even experiencing bugs in the installers in the latest versions.

A few notes: - the "stability" I refer to is always minor errors - I remove lots of packages every time I install it, although I've experienced system error notifications even when I didn't uninstall anything

All in all, I'd say that there is a lack of polishing, at the low-level, more than lack of stability.

There is no excuse for having the installation fail, though, and it happened a number of times.

To reply the question directly, I've used betas a few times, and they worked as much as the final version for me. I wouldn't do it now though - in the past, for my usage, some types of changes were very significant; today, I get very little in upgrading.

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I installed Ubuntu for the first time in a while (to get around the secure boot nonsense). I hadn't used it since they started with Unity, and the upgrade process nuked my install.

I agree, Ubuntu seems to work nicely out of the box, but behaves more and more like Windows, a kind of gradual deterioration over time. I am always getting warnings about some problem from suspend. It doesn't (seem to) stop anything working so far, but the install is only a month or two old.

On the other hand I tried Manjaro - a user friendly version of Arch. That needed a few more tweaks to get everything working after the initial install, but I have had it on another laptop for far longer, and so far non of these niggley problems like in Ubuntu.

> I've found the Ubuntu [Desktop] stability to be in constant decline over the time

I wish I never upgraded to 13.10. Sometimes drag-maximizing my window can crash my entire system. And compiz leaks memory like a sieve, sometimes I will wake up to find compiz using ~5.5gb of memory and the system will be unusable. Gotta restart!

When I first upgraded, I thought "oh, it's always like this at the start, they'll fix it." And here we are at the next version and it still hasn't been fixed.

Probably jumping ship (to another Linux distro) once my next work deadline passes.

Or maybe dig in and contribute a fix?

Is this a serious suggestion? I can't even reliably reproduce it. It just happens randomly. The problem could be unity. It could be in compiz. It could be in the nvidia drivers, which I don't even have the source to. Who knows what in that mess causes my system to lock up.

Regardless, I do not have enough loyalty to Ubuntu to do this kind of work. There are a number of open source projects that I am involved with, and if I spend time on this (likely to be fruitless) endeavor, I end up with less time to spend on projects I care about.

My post is purely to vent, and to serve as a warning for those looking to try Ubuntu Desktop. My personal opinion is to try something else. I am.

For anyone who does have the time and inclination to debug this there are some comprehensive docs on the wiki https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Debugging - I've used these steps to get backtraces before so devs can get stuff fixed.

There was a nasty bug recently with xorg (Intel driver) eating RAM then the kernel OOM killer would swoop in and kill the desktop. I filed a bug on launchpad and the upstream Intel driver maintainer was super attentive and got it fixed. It was a rough time while the issue was around, but it happens..

13.10 has absolutely not been worth it for me, neither. Right now I can't even start (or restart) Unity at boot up. This might not be because of Ubuntu, but Windows 8 doesn't have any problems with starting (dual boot).

I can confirm this. Installing Xubuntu quantal took me almost a day and I had to do it more or less manually. If i had used debootstrap right from the start it would have been a way easier. The installer crashed multiple times at different steps. The offical installer image does not even boot, but crashes right away, and you find yourself in the initrd busybox shell. There is no way to use it unless you have solid linux knowledge.

After running into such problems with it so quickly, why did you continue to try to use it?

Problems of that sort were understandable in 1995, when Linux and the few distributions available at the time were still relatively immature. They were even understandable in the very early 2000s, when hardware support sometimes wasn't great. But these days, there's really no excuse for a lack of quality like you're describing.

Because I had the Linux knowledge. But for the average user, that (x)ubuntu aims at, this is a unsolvable problem.

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